


swear to god we're cursed with all this sadness

by tinydragon (tiny_dragon)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Character Study, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-03-22 15:15:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13766856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiny_dragon/pseuds/tinydragon
Summary: Truthfully grief is a fluid thing. It’s not so much a bird or a storm or a feeling as much as it is some kind of swamp monster that lies low when it wants to but can also burst out from the dark and burn down a village and take you screaming. Grief is fucking weird. Grief takes each and every one of its victims in a new and different and fucked up way.an exploration of nico's life when his sister gets sick and death changes everything, and someone might fall in love with you but you're in too much pain to notice.





	1. before; during; after

**Author's Note:**

> hi this is very much centred around death and terminal illness so please take care of yourself! there is also mention of self destructive behaviour, particularly to do with alcohol.
> 
> this is not so much of a will/nico story as it is a study of these topics and how they can shape someone. im more concerned with looking at nico and grief in this than their relationship.
> 
> this might eventually get a second part, if and when i figure out how to end it. it was mainly written as a therapeutic exploration of sad feelings. if i come up with some of the answers nico needs to heal, maybe it'll get continued. it's a weird fic but i hope you enjoy it regardless :)

Nico splits his life into three distinct categories: before, during, after.

When Bad Things happen, people like to do the half and half thing. Compare the original picture with an aftermath. A glimpse at a beautiful landscape before it is slashed apart by an earthquake, drowned underneath huge scaping waves, before it was all taken away, before it was gone.

Nico’s before is something good and soft and safe. It is normalcy. It is breakfast times – dad reading the newspaper and mom pouring out the milk into their cereal bowls and Bianca describing each and every one of her dreams. She had so many and each one was more vivid, more larger-than-life than the next. As if, each time that she fell asleep, she was spirited away to bigger and better things. Where the colours are more vivid and the lights are brighter.

In her dreams, Bianca rides upon the backs of dragons, she fights with a bow and arrow and she meets a girl on the moon and they become the best of friends. She learns to sword-fight, she goes on quests, she talks underwater and she learns how to fly.

Nico’s dreams are never quite so exciting. He has a lot of dreams where nothing really happens but something feels just off-kilter enough for him to wake up feeling scared, on edge, to crawl into his mother’s bed, or his sister’s if he was worried about dad getting angry.

“You had a nightmare? What about?”

“I don’t know, I can’t remember…”

Sinister looking elves at Christmas time or zombies sticking their hands up from the ground, splitting apart the earth, dirt caked into their yellowing fingernails. The thing is – the zombies didn’t seem scary, it seemed like they were listening to him and the way that it made him feel was scary. Walking to school with no pants on, and he wouldn’t have cared if it wasn’t for the fact that everyone was looking at him, laughing. That everyone was laughing at him.

His dreams aren’t as good as Bianca’s, in the before. In the during, dreams seem something pointless and in the world of the after, dreams are the only place that he feels safe.

::

So: before and during and after. Happier days. Sunsets after school, bike rides down to the promenade, lessons on the piano, or sat at the kitchen table with mama, as she tried to teach him her mother-tongue, Italian. He will never forget those words. Flying kites, sandcastles, family holidays. Collecting mythomagic cards. Sometimes Bianca would play it with him, though she turned up her nose. Her friend, Percy from next door, he’d always join Nico for a game.

In hindsight, things could not have been this constantly perfect. Life is shaky and it falls back and forth and to and fro all of the time. But when something bad happens, he guesses, the entirety of your childhood is bathed in pale gold light.

Mama died, and he was still quite young. Bianca cried and dad became distant, on edge. He spent a lot of late nights working at the office and sometimes he came home smelling like whiskey.

But this was still before. This was bad, but bearable. This was a little child – surprisingly resilient – and a man who was prone to fall apart but didn’t. Because he had two thin hands, a left and a right, and a son and a daughter, with hands of their own, with which he could hold them.

The house shook. They held onto each other, onto the pieces of furniture that made their house still look homely, and lived in, even without the presence of mama to make it feel as it was before. They survived, just barely. They made it through.

Dad met a woman, Persephone, and she moved in and she was not mama but she was their step-mother and she loved them the best that she could. Just as dad loved her – because he’d still love mama, always, but she’d lost someone too. So she got it. You can still fall in love with someone in the here and now, even if a little piece of your heart will always belong to someone buried deep underneath the ground.

Nico, in the after, knows that now. He knows it more than ever.

His little sister, Hazel, born whilst he and Bianca were still small. Born on the last few months of the before. Born on the cusp of the during, for which, luckily, she would be too young to remember forever.

Not like Nico.

He would hold those memories forever.

While Hazel was new-born, he and Bianca still small, there was something inside of her that wasn’t quite right. And yet no one could notice. No one could see the inside of her skin, the bits in her body that began not to work. On the outside, she was the same: long dark hair and upturned lips, a heart-shaped nose and a smile, always a smile. Dad’s happy girl.

She looked just like mama.

Some of the last moments of The Before: two small children, two dark frames. Bent over the head of a little baby girl, leaving rose-print kisses against the softness of her cheeks.

::

The during.

The during is long and hard and shadowed. It is perhaps the longest section of his life.

He was eight when they finally got the diagnosis. First of all Bianca had complained of aches and pains. They’d taken her to big hospitals, large and white and full of people, brisk looking doctors, nurses with sympathetic faces.

She is fine, she is fine.

“We can’t find anything wrong,” the doctors reported but things continued to worsen, and then finally: a blot on the scan, an imperfection, a tumour.

You are likely never going to be old enough to find that your sister is sick. Or your daughter, or your friend – your mother or your father. You are never old enough to feel that knowledge settle in comfortably, but eight, eight is far too young.

It’s too young because it’s not. Because you are old enough to hold love and memories. Because you are old enough to understand.

Because you are old enough to remember, and not young enough to forget.

The During was painful. Infinitely so because it was slow. Because one minute she was there, his sister, his mama but smaller. She still had colour in her cheeks and energy in her body and chaos in her heart. They played pretend games in their house – she just couldn’t over-exert herself, but she could still play. She’d help him with his reading. She stopped going to school but she never stopped asking about his day.

She played with those stupid mythomagic cards.

And when she couldn’t play anymore – when she had to stay in bed they’d read together or colour in. Or they’d play boardgames and he’d climb into bed beside her, careful not to knock at any of her medicine, any of the strange things tying her to the bed and to all these weird medical things around her. He’d sneak in, during the night, to be by her side. To fall asleep against her shoulders.

The process was not instantaneous.

Firstly she grew weak and then she grew thin, very thin. Her body like strands of hair. And then there was no hair on her head and it didn’t make her look any less like her; like Bianca; like mama. She always would, with those eyes, with that smile. Rosebud lips, to leave flower-shaped kisses on her father’s cheek, on the crown of her brother’s head.

She learnt from mama. She kissed them where mama used to, so that they didn’t have to miss her so much.

It was long, slow. But after years, she grew weaker and frail and then she could not stay home, she had to stay elsewhere. So that he could no longer spend the nights at her side. So that he had to fall asleep in a house with only half of his family.

Baby Hazel learned to crawl and talk and finally to take baby steps. She was old enough to follow her brother around, but not yet old enough to realise that her big sister was dying.

The diagnosis came when Nico was eight. Her death came later, when he was twelve. After remission and prognoses and thousands of dollars donated to medicinal research in her name. There are some things that even the doctors can’t fix.

Hazel was old enough to understand and she grew up amid the after. The during, though, she didn’t have to remember, and Nico thanks whatever gods might be up there in the sky or down in the sea for that. That she didn’t have to watch Bianca suffer, like he did.

Like he saw every day.

Like he sees now, even now.

His life is split into three sections: the before, the during, and the after. He is twenty-one years old now, and he is still very much trapped in the after.

::

Will fits into the During.

He’s a new kid starting at school. He transfers in mid-way through the year, from Austin, Texas, with a funny Southern accent and a mop of blonde hair. He is assigned a seat a couple of rows over from Nico.

They don’t meet at the school. Nico gets a glimpse of him but when they file out to the playground he is immediately pulled into the group sported by Percy and Annabeth. Now that Bianca is sick, it is like they’ve made it their personal mission to take care of Nico.

He appreciates the support. Everyone thinks that you’re cool when the older kids like you, and they’re fun. And Nico likes being around Percy. He likes being around Percy quite a lot.

They don’t meet the school at all. They meet, weirdly, at the hospital. At this new place that Nico frequents almost as much as the school itself, that, whilst it holds his sister captive, becomes almost like a home.

You can get used to anything.

It happens on a Thursday.

After half an hour of talking and joking and Nico being with his sister, finally being back with his sister, he’s kicked out of the room by his dad and the doctor who need to run a few more tests.

Bianca rolls her eyes.

“Welcome to my life,” she says, and he snorts.

“Out, Nico,” says dad, quietly and tiredly.

He is always tired now, it seems. Right now, where they are – this nine year old boy who laughs at the squeaky sound made when he scuffs his sneakers against the sleek hospital floor – he cannot begin to imagine how tired his father is one day going to get.

How much things will change.

How quickly.

Nico leaves. The door clicks shut behind him and as always, it leaves this echo of a hollow feeling. What if this is the last time? What if this door never opens again?

That’s how it’d been with mama, after all.

The day had started with a kiss on the cheek. It had ended with hands pounding her chest in the hopes to start her heartbeat up and ready again, while she bled inside of her body. Nico will never forget that. That change, so quickly. In a matter of hours, a chaste touch between family to the ripping of apart of your body by strangers who are somehow dying to save you.

He swallows back the fear.

It’s going to be okay, he tells himself. Bianca is coming home.

She always comes home.

“Hey, you were in my class today!”

Nico whirs around in shock at the voice. It seems to come out of nowhere, but of course it doesn’t. It comes from a boy sat on a bench. He is holding a skateboard underneath one arm and he has a bright green shirt on. He has a crooked smile and a mop of blonde hair. He is the New Kid.

“Yeah,” Nico says slowly. “Hi.”

“I’m Will,” the kid – Will – tells him. He points a finger at himself which is kind of dumb, but he seems nice.

It’s weird to meet other children in the hospital. At least, children who are healthy. There are an abundance of ones stuck in beds just like Bianca’s, and it is the saddest thing in the world.

“Nico,” Nico tells him, before hesitating, and pointing a finger at himself.

“Boy am I glad to see someone else here. My mom’s a doctor and she’s working late, so I have to hang around here. I finished my homework and _man_ have I been bored since then. It’s pretty rough when homework is the fun part, right?”

Nico blinks at all the words. “Yeah,” he says. “That sucks, I guess.”

“It does,” Will agrees.

“Why do you have to stay here?” Nico asks curiously. When his parents go to work, they get someone to stay home with him, or they drop him at a friend’s house.

But he supposes Will is new here. Maybe he doesn’t have a friend yet.

“The babysitter cancelled,” Will says. Then he goes red. “Not that I need a babysitter though! I’m not a baby! My mom is just…”

“It’s okay,” Nico says. Smiles. “I get it.”

And so – friends. Nico does not tell Will today exactly why he is hanging out in the hospital halls. But at some point, he will do. And Will won’t run.

::

Losing someone is awful in any shape or form. There might not be anything worse. It’s hard to imagine your life one day without all of the people who were once in it. But it happens. It happens so suddenly. You lift your head and you blink and you open your eyes up wide, to white light and you realise: that you are alone.

Nico knew that Bianca was not going to live.

It wasn’t always hopeless. For a long time there had been hope and she got better for a little bit and she was so strong – “Mr di Angelo, the courage of your daughter is inspiring…” she lasted a lot longer than they initially thought. But she didn’t last forever. She died, and Nico knew she was going to die from the time he was ten. When the illness came back, with a bite.

Nothing we can do. We are so sorry, Mr di Angelo, we are so….

Father, in the end, was unable to tell him. He came home from the hospital and Nico had asked, how is Bianca?

But his dad didn’t reply. He rested his hand against the wall and he did not look like a person, but rather: a man made entirely of shadows.

And then he went into the kitchen and poured himself a very stiff drink.

Nico would recognise that smell anywhere: he tastes it now, on his own tongue, when he wakes up with a spinning head, with a hurting heart.

Persephone followed him in through the door. Baby Hazel, not such a baby anymore, played in with her toys in her room; didn’t even notice that they had gone, that Percy Jackson from over the road had been watching them all afternoon.

Persephone told Nico first. Hazel later, but she would not understand. Not until Bianca ran out of breath.

“Nico, we’ve got to tell you something.”

“About Bianca? Is she coming home?” Barely looking up from his cards. He’d just brought a new pack of mythomagic.

At this point, the hospital was routine.

You never think that you can get used to hospitals, to sickness. But in the after, you miss it – you’d fight just to be able to visit a hospital bed and linger at the side and hold a clammy hand – no one ever talks about that, about how soothing it is to have the routine of visiting a loved one. When they are safe in a white room, in a lumpy hospital bed. Before your visit is so rudely interrupted by a trip down to the morgue. To funeral homes.

“No, honey,” she’d said. She never ever called him honey. The word sounded weird in her mouth. She placed a hand on his shoulder. For better or for worse, she thought of him as her son, and Bianca as a daughter.

And this is what she told him: my daughter is dying.

Your sister is dying. Bianca is dying. The illness has spread through her body, it is inoperable, I’m so sorry but there is nothing that we can do for her.

And so: she will die. Not today or tomorrow. There are drugs that can be given to slow the course of the disease. To give her more time, to keep her strength up and the pain down. But she will die. Nothing we can do – no magical cure – no getting out of this.

Percy Jackson hovered at the door. He had not meant to listen in and he felt his heart break into two pieces: Bianca di Angelo was going to die. His friend, she was going to die, and this family. They would be left here, without her. An empty space at the table.

That night, he went home and he kissed his best friend, Annabeth Chase, on the lips. He did it because he had never before thought about the fact that thirteen year olds could die. Now that he knew, he refused to waste one more minute.

They fell in love. This could cause problems, later, maybe. But none of them were thinking that right now. It was love and love was strong and powerful and colourful. Love could save the world, couldn’t it? Love could save anyone.

But love could not save Bianca.

Nothing could save Bianca.

(And they did try love. Thalia Grace stood by her bedside every night. Best friends since they were small, she’d become accustomed to visiting her in hospital, to seeing her waste away. One time, they tried it – true love’s kiss – but it didn’t work. There is no such thing as magic. For a while, this may convince Nico that in turn, there is no such thing is love.

Bianca would have swatted him, to hear him say such a ridiculous thing.)

Bianca: strong and young, a huntress of the heart. She still had vivid dreams. At least in one respect she might see the whole world. She certainly couldn’t go by foot. But she pushed and she pulled. Thalia Grace stood by her bedside. Mr di Angelo became well-acquainted with whiskey. Nico visited every night and every morning.

Nico heard the words. He let them resonate in the air for a few seconds, tiny monsters with minds of their own. They had a pulse, and their little hearts began to beat, and that is when Nico knew that it was real.

He ran out of the door.

He ran to Will.

But he came back, for Bianca.

She lasted two more years, and then she was gone.

::

The funeral will always be a bitter memory. Funerals are hard and horrible whatever the occasion, but there is something particularly troubling about burying a child, about leaving a not yet fully-formed body alone under the ground, where she will fail to ever get older.

They dressed in black. Hazel cried. Now, she was old enough to understand.

Bianca’s friends rallied in, and it was crazy, to think that she’d had so many, when she’d been stuck inside in a bed for so many years. Percy Jackson, and Annabeth Chase; Thalia Grace and her brother Jason. It was the only time that anyone can remember seeing Thalia cry.

Reyna, who reached out a hand and placed it on Nico’s shoulder and felt it steady the world for a moment. Leo Valdez. Kids from school scattered throughout Nico’s memories.

Will Solace. For two years they spent their evenings wandering around hospital halls, ‘til Nico’s parents gave Will a ride back to theirs. They raided vending machines. They made up stories. At Nico’s house they played hide and seek and got lost in the long, empty halls, calling for each other’s names in large rooms, barely decorated, dusty at the corners.

Some days, Nico forgot.

Almost forgot.

Now, he can’t think of anything else.

When her casket was lowered into the ground Nico could not move. He did not fling himself down with it, grasp at the wood to pull her back. He did not scream. He was barely even conscious of himself crying. His family stood in silence, wariness, dressed in black with bowed heads. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the crisp cornflower blue of the day felt obtrusive. It felt invasive. It felt like it was taunting them all.

Bianca went into the ground.

One by one, the mourners dropped tiny keepsakes in after her. White lilies, stickers, beaded bracelets. Nico laid in his favourite ever mythomagic card.

He said goodbye.

Will looked at Nico from across the way. He had said something with his eyes. But Nico had looked away before he could figure out just what it was.

He thought: now, the healing will begin.

But it has been nearly a decade, since they buried his big sister. And there is still a gaping wound in his skin – a broken bone, a black eye. A hole in his heart where something has been stolen.

::

Some people grow in the face of tragedy. They become advocates for cancer research, or donate masses to charity to halt drug addiction. They campaign for mental health awareness, or dedicate their time to fixing whatever broken thing took that person that they love away.

Hazel is one of those people. Hazel is still in high school and already her time and energy goes toward charity, to immortalising. To my big sister, Bianca, who I will never forget – even though Hazel _has_ forgotten her. Forgotten the girl she was before: the would-be huntress, the adventurer, the mini mama. Before she became what so many people remember: the sick girl. The dead girl.

Some people grow up a little bit twisted.

Nico is one of those people.

Some people grow up framed by their tragedy. And they don’t want to dwell on that. They don’t want it to sew itself into the lines and stitches of their personalities, their beings – but it does anyway.

They still grow, but their pain grows with them.

It’s a slow process. For a long time, it will seem like things are getting better. You begin to cope, but then you stop coping and it has been so long and it was in the past and everyone has moved on. So no one thinks to ask anymore, and then suddenly, you are twenty-one years old and you are drunk out of your fucking mind and you are crying, because you miss your sister.

And your best friend, Will Solace, is there, rubbing circles into your back because there is nothing else he can do.

He says, “Nico, Nico it’s okay, shh, I’m here,” but Nico shakes him off and spits. Because of course it’s not okay.

Will says, “what can I do?”

And Nico just scoffs because nothing, he can do nothing. He can’t bring his sister back from the dead. He can do nothing.

He just watches – with big eyes. Will’s eyes are like tiny blue moons. He watches Nico and Nico doesn’t see anything. He doesn’t notice the solar systems hanging there. He doesn’t notice this love that blooms from something small. Their hands brushing. Squished together as they sleep in Will’s single bed. The way that Will watches Nico’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall.

Nico doesn’t notice and Will doesn’t say anything. But that’s okay.

Love is probably hard to see when you’re distracted by all of that pain.

::

Home has had a long long time to change itself since they became a family of four, not five. Since mama and Bianca left and in came Persephone and in came Hazel.

That’s not fair – he knows this – it’s not their fault. But the bitterness has slowly been growing. The first Christmas was hell for all of them. The second Christmas seemed to see things looking up a little, but by the fifth, the sadness was seeping back in and tearing everything apart. After that, Nico spent his Christmas mornings with his family, but the rest of the day with the Solace’s. Where he could at least hope to forget.

He loves his sister, and he loves his step-mom. She has done her best. She’s lent him pocket money and when she found out that he was gay she held his hands and said I’m so proud of you and I love you and that is what he’d needed to hear.

But what she wasn’t responsible for was what that reminded him of. That Bianca would never say those words. That neither was mama.

Persephone kept them afloat when father disappeared, off into the shadows. He still had two hands with which to hold the wrists of two little children, and pull them up for air when they began to sink. But this time, he kept them confined to his sides. They reached for him and he could not bring himself to touch them, for fear of losing another child. Eventually, they stopped trying.

Some people grow with their tragedies. Some people sink, and Nico’s father is one. He anchored himself to the bottom of some kind of far away ocean by filling his stomach with rocks and whiskey. He is still there in body. He sits in his office. But if you tried to talk to him, you would not recognise the voice.

Will Solace has been his son’s best friend for years upon years. Now, if you asked Mr di Angelo, he could not give you that blonde-haired boy’s name.

::

Some people say that the stages of grief are as follows: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Truthfully grief is a fluid thing. It’s not so much a bird or a storm or a feeling as much as it is some kind of swamp monster that lies low when it wants to but can also burst out from the dark and burn down a village and take you screaming. Grief is fucking weird. Grief takes each and every one of its victims in a new and different and fucked up way.

Hazel is on stage five. Father is on stage two.

Nico is at a different stage every day of the week. Every hour of the day. It’s not that simple. By sixteen, he is sick and tired of being given leaflets by the school counsellor on how he can help. By that point, the only thing that can help is Percy Jackson, and he never notices that this one little fact breaks a certain boy’s heart. In a few years, Percy Jackson will be replaced by another distraction that both helps for a moment and hurts in the long run, and that is whiskey.

High school goes by in a blur. At first things feel okay. He makes some friends other than Will, which is a first. Jason Grace is never far behind him, and whenever he spends the evening at their house Thalia comes out with so many stories about Bianca that he can almost hear her voice again.

High school is also hard because kids are mean, and they can smell weakness. Grief makes people feel uncomfortable. It’s like you’ve been marked out by something ugly, something untrustworthy, something that no one quite understands. So with the exception of Jason and Will, Nico is more or less alone. There is a black cloud over his head that makes the others want to stay away or at a certain point, reach out and recoil.

Nico wants to tell them: he is not scary, he’s sad. And he wants to tell them that he is not bad luck but rather he has had bad luck. He also wants to tell them to fuck off, which he does, and is, incidentally, not particularly helpful on the whole popularity front.

Persephone moves out when he is seventeen. Nico is given the choice to go with her. He says no, but Hazel doesn’t. The house becomes very big and very quiet and empty. He still goes to Will’s, but Will doesn’t come over to his. Father doesn’t like the sound, he doesn’t like to be disturbed. The whole building is coated in seven musky layers of sadness.

But it was where Bianca went. So he will always want to stay.

College can’t come fast enough, until it does. And then he is out of that house – that big, empty house – and he doesn’t want to go home. He’s still got Will and Jason and there’s Percy Jackson who he probably isn’t in love with anymore, but might always be a little bit. There is Reyna who makes him shower at least once a week. Will brings him food sometimes.

Will picks him up when he does something stupid.

Will tries not to raise his voice but sometimes he can’t help it.

So things are better. Things are better. Aren’t they?

But with college comes a certain kind of freedom, and Nico has had a taste for chaos since the good old days – since he and Bianca broke plant pots in the house and hastily covered the tracks by heaping dirt onto plates and stuffing them into the backs of cupboards. There is a hole in his heart. There is something empty. He does whatever he can to fill it, but the trouble is, he seems to be filling it with all the wrong things.

“Alcohol and cigarettes can’t fill a hole like that,” Jason says. He works for the college newspaper as an agony aunt, and now he seems to think he’s Gandalf the fucking Grey. “Shit is corrosive, if anything. Fill it with…”

“Love and hugs?” Nico says dryly. “Sunshine and rainbows?”

Jason rubs his eyes warily. “Maybe,” he suggests. “I was going to say gummy bears. At least they won’t rot your insides.”

Gummy bears, Jason thinks. Yeah. Kid needs some gummy bears. And he needs Will. Needs to open his fucking eyes.

But he won’t. Will won’t say anything and he won’t let anyone else, and the idea never seems to cross Nico’s mind at all.

Just to spite Jason, Nico goes out that night. And as he orders three straight shots of sambuca he is all too aware of what he is: a cliché, an over-told story, a typical case. There are stories about him in health books across the country: complicated grief. How to handle your problems badly. How to become a fucking mess in three easy steps.

He is aware of this. He knows how fucking stupid it is to drink and smoke and get into fights and fuck with people and actually fuck people – pretty boys in his classes or whoever is willing to pay for his next drink. He knows, but he doesn’t fucking _care_.

He doesn’t fucking care when he calls Will that night, a couple of miles of campus to come and pick him up because he’s thrown up on the sidewalk on the way home from some random party with a hickey on his neck.

When he drags himself into the seat of Will’s car and his best friend lectures him for almost an hour on being safe and being brave and being stupid and being reckless. When he can see flashes in Will’s eyes: of _this is getting too hard_. Of getting tired. Of all of this shit getting old. Of something that looks a lot like love but – no, can’t be. And when he sees that love, when he catches glimpses of that longing, when he sees for a moment the way that Will looks at him, he can only see that slowly, something is being eaten away.

Nico does not know that Will loves him. But he does know that he is wearing him down.

Because he is hurting.

And Nico is not concerned with telling a good story, with overcoming his demons, with becoming a fucking success story for the increasingly fragile state of the mental health system.

All Nico wants is for it to stop hurting.

 


	2. at the bottom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yooooo boy howdy it's been a while!
> 
> so this is a kinda important a/n; obviously the themes of this story are pretty dark but this chapter emphasises that. this chapter is entirely about self-destruction. it contains alcoholism, drug use, alludes (briefly) to sex, self-harm, suicidal ideation etc etc. it's also about someone being a very toxic person to their friends. i wanna emphasise i am NOT encouraging or glorifying this behaviour!!! at all. this story is not trying to show that this is how to cope with your grief, it's actually attempting to show the opposite. 
> 
> the whole reason i started this fic, and the reason i'm carrying it on, is because it's pretty biographical, a coping mechanism as i'm going through some similar stuff to fic!nico (i feel kinda weird writing about such serious themes with pjo characters but nico's always been quite relatable so??? apparently this exists now). i said i'd continue this when i figured out how to resolve nico's issues, and i'm in the process of doing so. that'll come in due course. this chapter is a demonstration of how it gets worse before it gets better.   
> (but it does get better. the next chapter will demonstrate that.)
> 
> so! please be careful and take care of urself. don't read if it will make you sad please <3

“Man,” Nico says. Slurs. “Will, dude, your eyes are – are so fucking blue.”

“Yeah,” Will tells him. His voice is a little bit more gruff than usual. “That’s genetics, for you.”

Nico hiccups loudly.

“Nah but like,” he pauses. Then moves forwards a few steps and stumbles. Will moves quickly and manages to catch him before he falls on his face again. Man, shots are a bitch. “They’re _so_ fucking blue. How have I not noticed this before?”

“You have,” Will sighs. “We have this conversation 9 out of the 10 times you get drunk.”

He mutters something else. Something like, _so twice a fucking week_ , under his breath but Nico isn’t listening. Still stumbling along. He twists his body to try and get a better view of Will’s eyes again. They’re so fucking blue, it’s mad.

He drank something blue tonight, he’s sure of it. And hey – blue used to be Percy’s favourite colour, didn’t it? Maybe it still is. It probably still is. Nico should ask him.

“What’s Percy’s number?” he asks.

“Huh?”

“Need to ask him – is his favourite colour still blue?”

“Yeah,” Will says. “Probably. Don’t call him. It’s late.”

“Is it?” Nico laughs. “Feels so early – just, I had this drink. So fucking blue. Tasted gross but…”

“You had three of them, actually,” Will sighs. “Hang on, okay, we’re gonna call you a taxi, get you home. You’re a bit of a wreck.”

_Again_. Word ghosting on his lips.

Nico frowns. Three blue drinks? Seems a bit much. But he remembers a lot of drinks. Gold pints and excess shots. You can pay ten dollars and get five, it’s a fucking bargain. Who’d he share them with again? Will?

Was Will there? Where’d Will come from?

Oh, he realises, he drank each shot alone. He was there with friends – he still has friends! But sometimes you need a fuck ton of shots, don’t you? He did. He – why did he?

There was something, he remembers. There was something really heavy and painful. It felt like a stone in his stomach. It tasted like something acrid and gross in the back of his throat and he remembers, he just wanted to get rid of it. It tasted like sadness. Sometimes the only cure to sadness is shots. He wishes people would get that.

Why don’t they get that?

Sadness, shots. He knows there is something. Something heavy and black, something scary. But he’s not sure what it is. He can’t remember.

There’s something to be sad about.

That’s why he did this, maybe. To soothe it. So that he wouldn’t be so sad anymore.

Will is speaking to someone. On the phone – oh, he’s ordering that taxi. His back has turned away from Nico. Fuck, he’s pissed him off again – he didn’t mean to. Really. He was just so sad. There was something. Something and he had just been so sad….

His stomach lurches.

Nico stumbles forwards and throws up violently on the streets of New York city.

::

Before lasted such a small time. During longer – but still short. The After has lasted such a long time. It seems to stretch out for miles and miles, further than the sky and all of its stars and its blinking sun and crescent moon. The After stretches out forever.

The After is how life is now, how it always will be.

Sometimes when he first wakes up in the morning he forgets. For a moment, nothing has changed. He is laid down in soft bedsheets, buried amongst the warmth and an unnecessary amount of pillows. He kicks his legs and he rolls over and his eyes don’t even open.

For a moment he knows nothing. He could be anyone. But he’s Nico and for a moment maybe everything is going to be okay until something sharp clicks into place and then: every day, a running gag reel of memories, of moments. Of someone helping him to tie his shoelaces. Of someone playing the piano. Of whispered words in soft Italian.

And then nothing is safe anymore.

And then he feels it, each morning, each time he remembers: he feels his heart shake, and it splits. And it’s a heart, fleshy and red, not a piece of glass or a Valentine’s day card centrepiece. So it comes apart messily, still pulsing weakly, bloody and stringy and not pretty at all. But there’s never been anything pretty about heartbreak, has there? There has never been a single beautiful thing about being sad.

::

See the thing is that there was someone who he loved so fucking much that he would have done anything to keep her heart beating. He’d have walked round the world twice or learned to breathe underwater. Figured out a way to spin gold. Turn water into wine.

He thinks now that he’d still do anything to bring her back. But no matter how many times he bargains in his head or pleads with a wishbone, nothing ever changes. Bianca is still gone.

It’s strange to think that now, he is older than she will ever be. That maybe she wouldn’t recognise him if they’d passed by each other in the streets. He’s sure he’d still recognise her.

Is she still his big sister? If she’s not ageing anymore and meanwhile, he grows?

There are people who should never grow old and never die, and those are the people who surround you when you are small enough for them to wrap their fingers around your wrists and squeeze, with room to spare. Your parents. Your big brothers or big sisters. They are not supposed to die. They are supposed to keep you safe.

When Bianca died: the world kept going. The grass continued to grow, the rain to fall in shattered spells of storms. The stars still cast light when evening fell. The cars kept moving. The roads kept filling, the traffic kept piling up. The sea kept swishing, the waves pouring forwards and falling backwards, crashing against the shore.

And Nico kept growing.

Voice broke, grew hair on his legs, arms elongating. Body, changing, growing. Ageing. To have a single birthday feels like a betrayal.

::

Grief is hard, grief sucks.

They say: there are five stages of grief but it makes no sense because it doesn’t. Because this is a feeling. This is more than a feeling. This is an overwhelming monster made of shadows and dust and sleepless nights and people crying and people dressed in black. Something that clutches at your heart and squeezes. That leaves bruises on your skin.

He imagines the gods he learns about in school, when he’s growing up. Of Zeus and Poseidon and Hades.

Of Orpheus and Eurydice. He wouldn’t have looked back. He would have saved his sister.

He imagines that all the quests in the world and all the battles and raging wars with gods and monsters and giants and titans, that all of it he’d take on in a heartbeat over feeling like this for a single moment longer.

::

It gets better, for a while. And then it gets worse. It always gets worse.

Because things happen. Because Nico realises that he likes boys and he never got to tell Bianca, not in so many words, not really knowing what it meant. Because with that comes this knowledge: that someday he might fall in love, he might get married, he might have a home and a kid and a dog and Bianca, and Mama too, will never be there to see it. His children will never meet their grandma, their aunt. No amount of stories can capture a person that important to you.

Because his dreams could come true but he’ll still be alone.

Because Bianca had dreams more vivid than his, so why did someone leave Nico’s here and spirit hers away, forever? All gone. He can barely remember the vivid dreams that she used to tell him about over breakfast.

This is the problem. This is why there are no five stages, because time goes on, indefinitely. Because things happen. Because things keep happening, time goes on, clock hands moving, moving faster every single year. Until you realise that a year has passed. Or two years or three years.

Until you realise that six years have passed, and you’re still so fucking sad.

::

And you think that you are okay. That you got over it at the start, when it first happened.

Nico didn’t come back from the funeral and learn intuitively what would wash the fear away, the sadness. What would burn away the longing if he closed his eyes and inhaled and filled his lungs with something grimy and grotty. Something that Bianca would have hated.

He imagines her slapping him around the head and shouting.

It’s not as though Will doesn’t do it for her. He gets upset. He waves his hands around emphatically and talks about health hazards and him being a fucking idiot.

“Bianca would hate you to do this,” he says, when Nico is eighteen and drinking gin illegally and his breath smells smoky and his mouth feels musky and metallic and gross.

Bianca would hate it. Hell, Nico doesn’t even like it.

The words sting but he has filled his insides with so much shit that it almost forms a protective layer around his heart. So that nothing can hurt him quite as much.

He smiles hazily. Sadly, almost accidentally.

“Yeah,” he says. “But Bianca’s dead, isn’t she?”

::

Nineteen, twenty. He goes to college, and drops out after a few months because he finds he’s spending a little too much time partying and a little too less time doing – well, whatever the fuck you’re supposed to do at college.

He enters the world of work because his father cuts off his credit cards, and that’s fine by Nico. He doesn’t need much. As long as he has something to distract him, to take his mind off of everything. Will, of course, is still in school. Nico feels guilty about the amount of time Will spends away from his medical textbooks, holding Nico’s shoulders in place as he vomits into the gutter, or dabbing at his face with a tissue to stop the flow of blood from his nose.

“How do you get yourself into these?” Will asks wearily.

“Some prick,” Nico replies vaguely. His nose is throbbing. “You should see the other guy,” he says, almost boastfully although it’s a lie.

The other guy was twice his size and though Nico got a couple of sizable punches in, Nico’s definitely come off worse. But the guy was being a bit of a dick. Sidling up to girls, pushing forwards in the bar queue, throwing his weight around – and Nico remembers that Mama and Bianca always taught him to stand up to bullies.

Nico explains this and waits for Will to be a little more enthusiastic, but Will only frowns.

“You should have talked to the bouncer,” he says. “Or confronted him, sure but not – Nico, you can’t just go up to people and hit them. Why are you being so reckless?”

Nico shrugs.

He doesn’t have an answer.

In a weird way – and he’s never considered himself much of a masochist – there’s something weirdly freeing about being pummelled into. About you and someone else throwing yourselves against each other, punching and kicking. Feeling the adrenaline swell in your heart.

Something about it makes his blood rush. It makes him feel alive.

Will calls him an idiot, and to be fair, he’s totally right.

::

Freeing in the same way that sleeping with a stranger almost sets you alight. Writhing against another body, calling out a name you know you’ll forget in the morning. Unfamiliar bedsheets. Stumbling home in the early hours, as the pink sun dawns over the city scape, the walk of shame. A familiar rush. The scratches on your chest.

His friends shoot him strange looks at the marks on his skin.

The only downside to this is that sometimes in the morning, where that fire once blazed so dangerously there is nothing left but detritus, ash, burnt-out buildings. The acrid taste of smoke.

The after-feeling, like his bruised body after a fight, or a pounding head after a bender, sucks, to be frank. But the after-shocks are never strong enough to startle him into stopping.

He supposes the issue with that is: he doesn’t really want to.

::

He’s twenty-one. Legal! Leaves his fake ID in the bin on the way to his next night out. Every day, no matter how small, or how recent, Nico is leaving a new bit of his past, of himself, behind.

::

On Will’s advice, near pleading, Nico attends a talking therapy appointment after being on the waiting list for months on end. Will spends hours exciting himself over this. Finally, a chance for Nico to talk, finally, a chance for him to _try_.

“You will, won’t you?” he asks, anxiously.

Nico says, “what?” and there’s this distant look in his eyes. Like he isn’t really seeing.

“Try.”

“Oh, yeah,” Nico says. “Of course.”

And he does. Or, he thinks he does. But this woman is reeling off lists of things he can do to stop himself from self-destructing. Talking. Reaching out to family and friends. Take a cold shower. Attend a seminar to learn how to cope with low self-esteem. She reels it off and Nico struggles to pay attention.

But he doesn’t like hearing Bianca’s name inside of a stranger’s mouth. And more than anything, he hates being told what to do.

(Especially when being told what to do is going to interfere with what he _wants_ to do.)

And so he leaves, half-way through and doesn’t make an appointment and as he makes his way out of the building, he lights up a cigarette. And he texts one of his new friends that he met at the bar, instead of Will, instead of Jason, and they make plans to meet later that night.

::

Slowly, people stop calling.

First Percy, Annabeth, Piper… Jason… It’s never without warning.

It’s, _I can’t stand to watch you do this to yourself._

It’s, _You’re becoming a really… toxic person to be around, Nico, and I can’t let myself be pulled into that_.

It’s, _I’m starting a family. I can’t keep doing this for you._

It’s okay, is what it is. It’s never without a warning, it’s never without a one last try, to get him to stop. It’s never without a, _maybe if you help yourself things can be different_. It’s never unfair, at least. Nico’s friends are not unfair.

But he never quite manages it. Or maybe, he never quite manages to care enough to try. And it never seems to matter, because you’re never lonely at the bar.

::

Rock bottom could be finding himself forgetting his key one night. His neighbours step hastily over his sleeping body as they make their morning commute to work. He wakes to find himself sprawled outside his door, awkwardly placed. His muscles ache for days, and no one will make eye contact.

Rock bottom could be white powder like castor sugar that he doesn’t dare taste. A folded, crisp dollar note, a quick sniff, and his heart racing a million miles an hour.

Rock bottom could be calling his best friend at four am. Four times he hears the dial tone, and then, “we’re sorry, but the person you have called is unavailable.”

 ::

New friends. Meets them at the same old scene. Will isn’t here, but they’d had a fight and maybe that’s why he needs all this shit that he’s putting inside of him, these drinks that he’s knocking back. Another stranger hands him a drink. Tastes like piss. Nico downs it anyway.

“You coming back to Trevor’s?” a stranger shouts over the music.

“Who the fuck is Trevor?” Nico replies.

Everyone laughs and they drag him out with him. As a group they surge through the city, grappling with each other. Arms around, singing. Nico’s not entirely sure where they’re going but he doesn’t ask.

His phone vibrates in his pocket. He frowns, pulls it out and stares at the name appearing in block text across the screen. Will.

“You’re destroying yourself,” Will had said this morning.

Nico had woken up on his sofa, with a bad headache, cradling a half-empty bottle of gin and still slurring his words a little bit. And Will had kind of exploded like a ticking time bomb and, well, Nico knows all about those, doesn’t he?

“Don’t be so fucking dramatic, Solace,” Nico had retorted, irritably. He reached behind his head, rubbed at his neck, massaging the flesh to rub out the crooked muscles from sleeping on a couch that’s too small even for him.

“I’m serious,” Will was saying. In the present day Nico stumbles forwards, tries to get the image, the words, out of his mind but they are stark clear and stoic. It’s like he isn’t here anymore, singing on the streets, but back in Will’s dingy apartment and…

“You’re going to end up getting seriously hurt, Nico. You have to stop…”

“Firstly,” Nico snapped. “I don’t have to do anything, thanks very much. And secondly…”

“You don’t understand, do you? What this is doing to me. What it’s doing to everyone around you.”

“It’s my life!” Nico yelled. “ _Mine_ , so what the fuck does it matter?”

“Because it’s selfish!” Will had bellowed. Nico had never heard him raise his voice so loud before. It seemed to shake the walls, break them down. Shatter everything. Shatter them. Something made of very fine glass had been standing between them, and they’d always been careful to tiptoe around it. Until that very moment. And it crashed. And it was though a waterfall of broken glass descended in the apartment and everything seemed to break with it…

Nico went home and pretended not to hear Will’s sobs as the door slammed shut.

And now he is here, and he is selfish.

Selfish. It’s a strange word.

“Selfish,” Nico says aloud, to try it.

“What’d you say?” asks one of the girls standing near him. Nico shakes his head.

The phone in his hand stops ringing. And then it starts again.

Will, calling over and over. Missed calls: eight.

Sighing, Nico brushes his thumb over the ‘off’ button, and cuts the connection between them.

::

Sometimes Nico finds himself under siege by shadows, memories. They come at him so quickly and he has only human hands to act as any kind of shield. He cowers beneath tables and chairs and hopes that the monsters underneath the bed don’t spot him, when he’s crouching on the floor eye to eye with them. But they always do.

One moment he is here, and here is no desirable place to be; here is a dingy apartment, here is somewhere covered in dirty dishes, unmade beds and sheets that haven’t been washed in far too long. He can’t go back home because Persephone will start by saying, “Nico, we’re worried about you”, and father won’t say anything at all. Father’s silence will ensure the cracks in his soul grow deeper and deeper, until there is nothing there but black.

And there is Hazel, he remembers. He can’t let her see him like this.

When you reach rock bottom – and Nico likes to think that that, solidly, is here. But truthfully, he might not be. Every time you think, “things can’t any worse,” they always immediately seem to. But. When you reach rock bottom, it’s a lie to say that you don’t care about anyone anymore. You do. They are there, in your peripheral vision. You can see them. When you get out of bed and it’s six in the evening, and you find yourself out of another job. When you go find yourself on another bender and you forget to call and wake up to six missed messages… you were thinking of them, you were, when you were downing those last drinks. Only you could never admit it to them.

It’s easier to pretend that you’ve forgotten them, than to admit that you remembered, and yet you still let yourself fall.

It’s not that Nico doesn’t care about his family, his friends. His baby sister.

How could he not, when he remembers he and Bianca, still babies themselves, almost, crouching down around her crib and trailing their thumbs along her soft, brown, baby skin. Pressing heart-shaped kisses against her face as she yawned and her eyelids fluttered open. When she laughed for the first time, giggled and Nico thought, _you’re my little sister and I’ll never let anything hurt you_ but hey, he’s human, and irony exists.

About Persephone, and Will. And Bianca. An imprint of a person, a ghost of a sister. He cares, he cares, he always fucking cares.

But the sadness is a hole in which he falls, time and time again. So dark and deep it is that he’ll fall for miles upon miles, until no one can hear his voice, screaming for a rescue.

Until every bit of light from the sun or stars is swallowed away by the darkness and the dirt.

And here he is again: rock bottom.

::

Even Will has his limits.

They don’t really talk anymore.

::

He sits at her grave. It’s early morning. The clouds are a dull grey, and through them a watery summer sun is struggling to shine its way through.

He’s sitting cross-legged in the dirt. He forgot to bring fresh flowers. He hasn’t been home, hasn’t showered; his stubble is growing out and he knows he looks like a wreck. He imagines who he would be if she hadn’t left him.

He gets angry like that, sometimes. Sometimes for a second all he can do is blame her. For not fighting hard enough, for not wanting to stay by his side enough. Sometimes he is filled with this short, blazing anger, as he imagines the world if she hadn’t died. Sure, the sun may shine as normal, and the birds would keep singing their unknowable songs, but he’d be happy. He would be good, he’d be better. He would be stronger. He’d still be studying, instead of being a college dropout. He’d be able to look his step-mother in the eye, and father would still smile.

It’s horrible, but it’s always short, at least. Like a fire, it catches and spreads, but once it’s out, it’s out. No sparks continue to catch and then he is filled with this short and bitter sort of hate for himself, and he hears that word again, the one that Will made reverberate inside of his head for weeks.

_Selfish_.

Because it isn’t Bianca’s fault he is like this. It isn’t father’s fault. It isn’t the fault of the Christian god or the Greek ones, like Hades underground, pulling beating hearts like puppet strings.

It isn’t anyone’s fault but his own.

And so he sits, shrewdly, at her graveside and he thinks sorry thoughts, but he’s long past the stage of talking out loud to a mound of stone who will never talk back. So he sits and he thinks. He imagines with all of his strength, til it is the only thing that he can think: sorry.

He sits there for a long long time, until the sun does come out. And he watches it drop beneath the jarred shapes of the looming trees, watches it sink away, until the stars come out and shimmer.

::

Sometimes things hurt so much on the inside that the only thing you can do to stop yourself from dropping dead, right there and then, is to hurt yourself even more on the outside.

This never ends well.

::

Will doesn’t call anymore. Nico tried to be angry, but anger can only last you so long until it fades out. Fire to ash, black to grey.

Now, Nico has Trevor though. Money will run out someday, but for now he has a steadfast supply.

Bottles, packets, pills.

Colours. Blue liqueur.

“Percy, is blue still your favourite colour?” he cackles down the phone. Slurring his words, stumbling.

“Nico, it’s three am.”

“Sssshit, really? Didn’t see the time, man, sorry.”

“Go home.”

“But is it?” Percy has hung up, Nico keeps yelling. “Blue! S’it still your favourite colour?”

Colours: little baggies filled with green, white powders. Amber liquids. Drink it down. The colours here are nice; different shades of changing light. From here, it all looks better, brighter. Much better, in the haze of the party. Much better than the browns and blacks that surround him when he reaches rock bottom, time and time again.

::

He’s still drunk.

His eyes are heavy, his stomach hurts. And Will’s here. Why is Will here?

They’re not part of each other’s lives anymore. Nico is toxic. Isn’t he?

But Will’s eyes are redrimmed, he’s been crying. And Nico realises they’re at his apartment. His knees are caked with mud, blood. Where was he tonight? He doesn’t remember a lot. He’s in and out of consciousness. Swaying, back and forth.

“It’s going to be okay,” he’s murmuring. “We’re going to get you to the hospital.”

Hospital?

“What,” Nico’s whispering. “Will, what’s…”

“I told you,” Will’s voice is nothing but a whimper. “I told you. That this would happen. That something would happen if you didn’t stop. Why didn’t you listen?”

Nico’s voice is hoarse from smoking too much, or something else. His throat is dry. He wants to say something, but he’s not sure exactly what.

He has always been the one to fall into pieces. Will has always remained steady, strong, stoic.

“I’m sorry,” Nico tries to say. Will hears him, but he doesn’t say anything else. He simply shakes his head. He doesn’t want to hear it. His face is streaky. Lines of tear tracks and Nico feels a painful jolt in his stomach, an uncomfortable lurch, like vomit.

“What have you done to yourself?” Will asks, a moment later. The ambulance are on their way. Soon, Nico will be taken away from here. “Did you do it on purpose?”

Nico can’t remember.

He doesn’t know what to say.

And suddenly Will breaks. He’s howling, crying, and he moves in and hugs Nico, tight. Near puts him in a choke-hold and he holds him until Nico can hardly breathe.

::

Rock bottom looks like a lot of different things, but what they say is true. Once you reach a certain point you can’t dig a hole any deeper. You can try. You can scratch out your nail beds, leave yourself with cut fingers upon rock, hands dirtied with mixtures of mud and blood, red and brown, until you collapse in exhaustion but: once you reach a certain low, the only way left to go is up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am on tumblr at willandlyra if you ever need to talk :)

**Author's Note:**

> feedback is very much appreciated!!


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